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Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?

#231

Post by BatteryMountain »

resonious wrote: post #165

I think one fatal flaw is letting the agent build the app from scratch. I've had huge success with agents, but only on existing apps that were architected by humans and have established conventions and guardrails. Agents are really bad at architecture, but quite good at following suit. Other things that seem to contribute to success with agents are: - Static type systems (not tacked-on like Typescript) - A test suite…

C# works great for agents but it works due to established patterns, strict compiler & strong typing, compiler flag for "Treat Warnings as Errors", .editorconfig with many rules and enforcement of them. You have to tell it to use async where possible, to do proper error handling and logging, xml comments above complex methods and so on. It works really well once you got it figured out. It also helps to give it separate but focussed tasks, so I have a todo.txt file that it can read to keep track of tasks. Basically you have to be strict with it. I cannot imagine how people trust outputs for python/javascript as there are no strong typing or compilers involved, maybe some linting rules that can save you. Maybe Typescript with strict mode can work but then you have to be a purest about it and watch it like a hawk, which will drain you fast. C# + claude code works really well.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?

#232

Post by colechristensen »

There's an impedance mismatch between some people and LLMs and I think one of the major reasons boils down to having preconceived notions about how it should get things done and being frustrated and disappointed when it doesn't. If you explore how to get the best out of it you can by trying many different kinds of ways to interact with it you'll have much more success.

I have had similar problems with colleagues who couldn't abide by others solving problems in ways that they disagreed with and would only be agreeable coworkers if they thought in the same way.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?

#233

Post by atraac »

In my case, I use JetBrains Junie(it uses various models underneath) and it mostly works fine, but I don't vibe code entire products with it, I just give it easy, neatly defined tasks. Improve readme, re-implement something using the same approach as X, create a script that does Y etc. It's fairly good at making one-off tools I need, we messed up something and need a tool to f.e. fill up db with missing records? I'll just make a console app that does this. We need a simple app that will just run somewhere and do one thing(like listen to new files and insert something to a db). It's perfectly fine for that. I wouldn't trust it with day to day job, features, anything more advanced(I do mostly backend work). I also have to verify thoroughly what it ends up doing, it tends to mess up sometimes but since most of what it does is non-critical, I don't mind. I too don't believe the claims of people who just straight up Claude they way through a codebase to do 'grand' things but I have a small sample.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?

#234

Post by edanm »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #192
edanm wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question - what kind of example would help at this point? Here are a sample of (IMO) extremely talented and well known developers who have expressed that agentic coding helps them: Antirez (creator of Reddit), DHH (creator of RoR), Linus (Creator of Linux), Steve Yegge, Simon Wilison. This is just randomly off the top of my head, you can find many more. None of them claim that agentic coding does a years' wor…

Nit: s/Reddit/Redis/ Though it is fun to imagine using Reddit as a key-value store :)

Aaarg I was typing quickly and mistyped. :face-palm:

Thanks for the correction.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?

#235

Post by tcldr »

regularfry wrote: post #206

So review the code. Our rule is that if your name is on the PR, you own the code; someone else will review it and expect you to be able to justify its contents. And we don't accept AI commits. What this means in workflow terms is that the bottleneck has moved, from writing the code to reviewing it. That's forward progress! But the disparity can be jarring when you have multiple thousands of lines of code generated ev…

Totally agree. If I don’t understand the code as if I’d written it myself, then I haven’t reviewed it properly. And during that review I’m often trimming and moving things around to simplify and clarify as much as possible.

This helps both me and the next agent.

Using these tools has made me realise how much of the work we (or I) do is editing: simplifying the codebase to the clearest boundaries, focusing down the APIs of internal modules, actual testing (not just unit tests), managing emerging complexity with constant refactoring.

Currently, I think an LLM struggles with the subtlety and taste aspects of many of these tasks, but I’m not confident enough to say that this won’t change.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?

#236

Post by theshrike79 »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #217

I have three uses of agentic coding at this time. All save me time. 1) low risk code Let's say that we're building an MVP for something. and at this moment we just wanna get something working to get some initial feedback. So for example, the front-end code is not going to stick around. we just want something there to give a functionality and a feeling but it doesn't have to be perfect. AI is awesome at creating that…

#2 is a big thing

I have an actual work service that uses a specific rule engine, which has some performance issues.

I could just go to Codex Web and say "try library A and library B as replacements for library X, benchmark all three solutions and give me a summary markdown file of the results"

Then I closed the browser tab and came back later, next day I think, and checked out the results.

That would've been a full day's work from me, maybe a bit more, that was now compressed to 5 minutes of active work.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?

#237

Post by shafyy »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #217

I have three uses of agentic coding at this time. All save me time. 1) low risk code Let's say that we're building an MVP for something. and at this moment we just wanna get something working to get some initial feedback. So for example, the front-end code is not going to stick around. we just want something there to give a functionality and a feeling but it doesn't have to be perfect. AI is awesome at creating that…

This is a pretty good summary how it works for me, too. My main use case being the "advanced autocomplete" or what you call "typing for me".

But to answer the OP's question: I am on the same boat as you, I think the use cases are very limited and the productivity gains are often significantly overestimated by engineers who are hyping it up.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?

#238

Post by theshrike79 »

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #9

The only approach I've tried that seems to work reasonably well, and consistently, was the following: Make a commit. Give Claude a task that's not particularly open ended, the closer to pure "monkey work" boilerplate nonsense the task is, the better (which is also the sort of code I don't want do deal with myself). Preferably it should be something that only touches a file or two in the codebase unless it is a trivia…

> I don't bother giving it guidelines or guardrails or anything of the sort

Where do you give these guardrails? In the chat or CLAUDE.md?

Basic level information like how to build and test the project belong in CLAUDE.md, it knows to re-check that now and then.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?

#239

Post by closewith »

dust42 wrote: post #216
fhd2 wrote: post #191

Bear in mind that there is a lot of money riding on LLMs leading to cost savings, and development (seen as expensive and a common bottleneck) is a huge opportunity. There are paid (micro) influencer campaigns going on and what not. Also bear in mind that a lot of folks want to be seen as being on the bleeding edge, including famous people. They get money from people booking them for courses and consulting, buying the…

> This stuff is relatively new, I don't think anyone has truly figured out how to best approach LLM assisted development yet. Exactly. But as you say, there are so many people riding the hype wave that it is difficult to come to a sober discussion. LLMs are a new tool that is a quantum leap but they are not a silver bullet for fully autonomous development. It can be a joy to work with LLMs if you have to write the um…

> But as you say, there are so many people riding the hype wave that it is difficult to come to a sober discussion. LLMs are a new tool that is a quantum leap but they are not a silver bullet for fully autonomous development.

While I agree with the latter, I actually think on former point - that hype is making sober discussion impossible - is actually directionally incorrect. Like a lot of people I speak to privately, I'm making a lot of money directly from software largely written by LLMs (roadmaps compressed from 1-2 years to months since Claude Code was released), but the company has never mentioned LLMs or AI in any marketing, client communications, or public releases. We all very aware that we need to be able to retire before LLMs swamp or obsolete our niche, and don't want to invite competition.

Outside of tech companies, I think this is extremely common.

> It can be a joy to work with LLMs if you have to write the umpteenth javascript CRUD boilerplate.

There is so much latent demand for slightly customised enterprise CRUD apps. An enormous swathe of corporate jobs are humans performing CRUD and task management. Even if LLMs top out here, the economic disruption from this alone is going to be immense.

Re: Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?

#240

Post by embedding-shape »

fhd2 wrote: post #191

Bear in mind that there is a lot of money riding on LLMs leading to cost savings, and development (seen as expensive and a common bottleneck) is a huge opportunity. There are paid (micro) influencer campaigns going on and what not. Also bear in mind that a lot of folks want to be seen as being on the bleeding edge, including famous people. They get money from people booking them for courses and consulting, buying the…

> There are paid (micro) influencer campaigns going on and what not.

Extremely important to keep in mind when you read about LLMs, agents and what not both here, on reddit and elsewhere.

Just the other day I got offered 200 USD if I posted about some new version of a "agentic coding platform" on HN, which obviously is too little for me to compromise my ethics and morals, but makes it very clear how much of this must be going on, if me, some random user, gets offered money to just post about their platform. If I was offered that 15-20 years ago when I was broke and cleaning hotels, I'd probably take them up on their offer.

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